Surgeons are required to precisely distinguish between various tissues when performing surgery. A significant amount of time and effort in thoracic and abdominal cavity surgery is devoted to providing unobstructed access to the particular tissue that is being modified, removed and/or replaced. Surgical procedures benefit from an unobstructed surgical field, which provides the surgeon with good visibility of, and a clear path to, the tissues and/or organs of interest. Various means have been employed to create unobstructed surgical fields.
The "non-cutting" hand of the surgeon or a hand of a surgical assistant can, of course, be used to obtain a relatively unobstructed surgical field. However, this means for clearing the surgical field requires a free hand, which may not always be available or accessible to the surgical field. Moreover, the presence of an additional hand in the surgical field can be an impediment in itself.
Metal retractors and spatulas can be used in lieu of an additional hand in the surgical field, but still generally require a surgical assistant to hold the device. Moreover, retractors and spatulas are relatively inflexible, and thus must be removed from the surgical field relatively early in wound closure.
Surgical "fish" or "flounder" are said to provide some of the benefits of an additional hand without the drawbacks. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,964,417 to Peters discloses a fish-shaped wound closure device made of a flexible sheet material, adapted to be removably inserted under tissue adjacent to a surgical incision to cover and retain within the body cavity internal organs exposed by the incision.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,863,639 to Kleaveland discloses a reversibly inflatable retainer device for temporarily retaining viscera inside the abdominal cavity of a patient during closure of an abdominal incision following surgery.
While the foregoing techniques and devices have been more or less effectively employed during conventional open surgical procedures in which large incisions are created, they are not adapted for use in laparoscopic/thorascopic surgery, wherein surgical procedures are conducted through at least one surgically created porthole into the patient's body.
The benefits from laparoscopic/thorascopic surgery are numerous. Large scars are eliminated, and the process in many instances is relatively bloodless and is much less traumatic to the patient than open surgery. The patient is ambulatory much sooner after laparoscopic/thorascopic surgery than after open surgery.
However, the limited means for accessing the surgical field during laparoscopic/thorascopic surgery require that instruments be adapted for deployment via tubes into the patient's body. Instruments must be narrow enough to be inserted into a patient without causing undue trauma. Moreover, the limited number of portholes cut into the body further limits access to the surgical field to as few as one or two instruments simultaneously.
As with open surgery, laparoscopic/thorascopic surgery requires a relatively unobstructed surgical field. In particular, the relatively free-floating intestines frequently obstruct the surgical field during abdominal cavity laparoscopies. Thus, there has been a need for a device that helps to provide an unobstructed surgical field for laparoscopic/thorascopic surgery.
All references cited herein are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.